Computational science explores models of natural and artificial world aiming to understand at greater depths than otherwise possible. It’s a modern field where computers are used to solve problems whose difficulty or complexity places them beyond analytic solution or human endurance. Sometimes the computer serves as a super-calculating machine, or as a laboratory for numerical simulation of complex systems, or as a lever for human intellectual abilities, and optimally as all of them.
The focus of a computational scientist is science. So, computational science is not computer science. Computer science studies computing for its own intrinsic interests and develops the hardware and software tools which computational scientists use. This difference is not just semantic or academic. Computational scientists are interested in computer applications in science and engineering, and their values, prejudices, tools, organizations, goals, and measures of success reflect that interest. For example, a computational scientist may view a particular approach as reliable, self explanatory, and easy to port to sites throughout the world, while a computer scientist may view it as lengthy and inelegant; maybe both are right, because both are viewing it from their different disciplines.
Computational science is a team sport. It draws together people from many disciplines via commonality of technique, approach, and philosophy. A computational scientist must know a lot about many things to be successful. But because the same tools are used for many problems in different fields, he or she is not limited to one specialty area. A study of computational science helps broaden horizons, which is a welcome exception to the stifling subspecialization found in science.
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